How unpopular was the last military dictatorship in Argentina? In Consent of the Damned: Ordinary Argentinians in the Dirty War, David Sheinin poses this question and takes an infrequently traveled path to answer it. He explores the emergence, development, and reconfiguration of a discourse about human rights during the period of the last military dictatorship (1976–1983) and its immediate aftermath, distinguishing between three different phases. The first phase concerns the beginning of the military government, when Amnesty International played a leading role in the campaign against the dictatorship yet failed to shape Argentine society's vision concerning the violation of human rights. The second focuses on how the military government itself constructed the narrative on human rights, appealing to a public that supported many of its objectives. Running until late 1983, the third phase involves the transition to democracy and some domestic...